Brush seals are used in many consumer, industrial, and commercial sealing applications to help provide a substantially air tight or gas tight seal, prevent air infiltration, as well as to provide a pressure drop resistant barrier. Such brush seals are typically part of a brush seal assembly that includes an elongate brush holder in which an elongate brush that provides the brush seal is received. The brush has a plurality of pairs of filaments folded over one another so their free ends form brush bristles with the folded filaments received in a tape or spine that holds the filaments in place. The brush holder typically is an elongate bracket having an elongate brush-receiving channel that holds the spine or tape of the brush and includes a mounting flange used to attach the entire brush seal assembly to something else, such as a piece of equipment, or the like.
Some sealing applications, particularly higher temperature sealing applications, adhere to relatively strict maintenance schedules that try and minimize equipment downtime. Many times there is a limited window of time to perform maintenance during scheduled downtime that can restrict the amount of actual maintenance that can be performed. Unfortunately, given the limited amount of time available, there are times when not all maintenance sought to be performed can be done.
In the past, changing brushes involved considerable time and effort. Where a brush could not be pulled out one end of the holder, the entire brush seal assembly would have to be removed by removing the brush holder. Even where one end of the brush holder is sufficiently unobstructed to allow a several foot long brush to be pulled in an axial or longitudinal direction out of a several foot long brush-receiving channel of the holder, it is neither simple nor quick to do so. The challenge is not just limited to brush removal, as the replacement brush needs to be inserted back into the brush receiving channel of the holder in a similar laborious manner. This also takes a considerable amount of time, can require great patience, and significant skill.
It is not unusual for these challenges to be compounded where brush replacement must be performed in a rather limited space. It can take considerable time to maneuver a brush being removed from the holder around walls and other obstacles which can require even more time to insert the replacement brush as more care must be taken to avoid damaging it during insertion.
What is needed is a holder constructed to enable faster brush changes.